A tip to recruiters from a Software Developer

As self employed software developer, I get job offers from head hunters and recruiting companies on a regular basis. They usually give me a rough requirement description like

C++ programmer with 10 years of experience to work on a database related project for 3 months in Vienna

and ask me if I would be interested in that job. If it sounds interesting, I say "yes, maybe" and ask them for the name of the company or at least some more project details, because these are the only real factors which influence if I will do the job. It's the only way to roughly judge how the job will look like and what conditions I would have to work in during the next 3 months.

It's quite a pity that these recruiting companies never tell you the name of the company beforehand. Or at least some project details. The reason is that they fear you'll contact the company yourself to get the job without them. But with this, probably they shoot themselves in the foot:

I guess I'm not the only developer who started to simply say 'no' to the majority of job offers without any such details. It's simply less time consuming to skip offers of recruiters without any details and pick those few with in-depth descriptions.

nine comments, already:

I guess you are pretty much comfortable financially. If you are desperately looking for job, you will be saying yes for every opportunity syedhs - 26 01 10 - 17:27

Agreed. What I usually do in such cases is to throw their description into Google. 75% turn up as a search result along with company name etc.matt (link) - 26 01 10 - 21:09

exactly what I do, I guess that’s why they shorten the descriptions down to the bare minimum :)niko - 27 01 10 - 07:08

I guess that it’s a problem with the way that recruiters work with contractors, they’ll usually take a percentage of your wage rather than a finder’s fee, so they won’t hand over a job spec until you give up your resume.

Once they hand over your resume to the employer, other recruiters are usually blocked from submitting you. At this point you’re then unable to shop around for a recruiter with less of a margin and more money for yourself. Most big companies have a small number of preferred suppliers so there is very little competition in the first place, from the employer’s point of view it’s good to only have a few trusted agencies than lots of bad ones who don’t filter anyone out. You can usually bet that the more agencies who are competing, the more vague the public advert is.Gaz - 28 01 10 - 07:35

an other experience from vienna:
3 different recruiters, total amount of time from first contact to the end of first interviews about ~15 hours.
And at the end I had to realize that I talked about the same job with all 3 recruiting companies.
(and those companies are not home sofa founded xing constructs)
10 hours waste of time for me.auchinwien - 29 01 10 - 06:38

This is a problem extended to the outsourcing world too.before u know on what you have to put your hand you have to sign 1000 nda contracts.then you can accept and take knowledge of the matter of the project.i can understand the attitude of recuiment company (it’s in their interrar that you don’t contact directly the commitee) but this risk to’ put you in some disastered company.Garixi - 29 01 10 - 09:01

C++ programmer with 10 years experience to work on a database related project?
Toward database projects more important are a database skills.
C++ has almost nothing to do with stored procedures :)etcaptor - 29 01 10 - 23:43

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